Guidance for NGOs?

Guidance for NGOs?

The authorities are reportedly drafting a decree on the guidance of this country's non-governmental organizations (NGOs). According to Coordinating Minister for Political Affairs and Security Soesilo Soedarman, the NGOs "have not been guided properly."

Although the nature and stipulations of the decree have not yet been made clear to the public, the leaders of some NGOs are already questioning whether such a move is needed at all and voicing concern about how much freedom the government's new policy will allow them.

The NGOs are concerned the government will classify them as mass organizations, which have to register with the Ministry of Home Affairs for legalization, even though they are non-profit organizations having no membership system. Unlike mass organizations, the establishment of all NGOs is based on notarized acts, which are registered at local district courts.

The NGOs also are actively questioning how the planned regulation will be implemented amid the much heralded trend toward political openness.

The perceived need for such guidance on the part of the authorities is apparently the result of the uneasy relationship that has developed between the government and some NGOs.

It seems that some of the NGOs are perceived as having crossed over the thin line between openness and undue criticism, making the authorities uncomfortable with their clamoring over human rights and the environment. The issue of human rights is perhaps the most sensitive of the two because it is closely related to the matter of political stability. And the fact that some NGOs have been cooperating with foreign organizations has made their relationship with the authorities even tenser.

NGOs are not a local phenomenon. In recent years they have become some sort of international necessity, especially in countries where sound socio-political systems are still being developed.

In Indonesia the NGOs have been born from the wombs of a political format and a social structure, which many people, notably members of the younger generation, feel have not provided enough opportunities for them to participate in the county's modernization programs.

Because NGOs have grown up from the grassroots and government policy and its tendency toward pragmatism has come from above, there have occasionally been differences in the approaches of the two parties toward what are meant to be mutually beneficial development efforts. The resulting situation has unavoidably pushed the two into a cycle of suspicion and eventually onto a collision course.

Although some NGOs have a strong habit of producing little more than political statements, to accuse all of the existing NGOs of being ill-intentioned is not only absurd, but also groundless.

There are some 2,000 organizations here which can be defined as NGOs, most of which carry little, if any, political weight, thus having negligible ability to even begin to disturb the stability of the nation.

In that light it seems self indulgent on the part of the authorities to hang onto an excessive fear of the existence of NGOs.

This is particularly so when we observe the fact that there are NGOs which have helped expand the public's awareness of the importance of law and justice, of the need to preserve the environment, of the importance of the fight against poverty and of the need to improve the welfare of villagers. All of these are efforts supportive of the government's own drive to improve the overall well being of the entire populous.

Hopefully the authorities will be generous enough to continue to give the NGOs the opportunity to air their opinions and do what good they can because these groups are capable of helping the government make its development programs a success.